Chains in MinimalismFebruary 12‐13, 2011
Yokohama National University
Yokohama, Japan

Invited Speakers:

Cedric Boeckx (ICREA/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Norbert Hornstein (University of Maryland)

This international workshop, which will be held at Yokohama National University
(YNU) in Japan, is part of a four year research project, now in its final
year, on "The Role of Chains and their Mechanisms of Interpretation in Minimalism", , funded by a Grant‐in‐Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The 2 day workshop will feature talks by some of the project members as well as by two invited keynote speakers. In addition, a number of slots will be made available for paper‐presentations solicited through this open call for papers and selected based on anonymous review of abstracts by two or more reviewers.

The concept of 'chain' has long played a central role in the theory of generative grammar. Yet the precise nature of chains is still not well understood. Furthermore, within minimalism, many new questions about chains have been raised, including concerns about their very existence as syntactic objects. Our research project is focused on trying to address and answer the following sorts of questions:

Do chains exist? Is there empirical evidence for the existence of chains
as syntactic entities of some sort?

To what degree, if any, does the notion of chain play a crucial role in
the analysis of particular linguistic phenomena, e.g., control, anaphora,
quantifier scope ambiguities, reconstruction, speaker preferences, locality
of movement, resumption strategies, etc.?

If chains exist, what kind of objects are they? How should they be defined? What are the computational mechanisms underlying chain formation?

What role, if any, do chains play at the interfaces? What are the mechanisms
of chain interpretation at, say, PF or LF (or their variants in terms of
multiple spell‐out models)?